It is well known that counter insurgency expert Sir Robert Thompson, after his ‘success’ in Malaya, went to Vietnam, under the title of British Advisory Mission, to help the Americans. He was head of the mission until 1965, subsequently visiting Saigon a number of times before being appointed a special consultant by President Nixon. Less publicity has been given to the involvement of other British military personnel in the Vietnam war.
“More sensitive operations, such as those in Vietnam, have been refuted by political sleight of hand…” (Whisper Who Dares Terence Strong, Coronet, 1982)
Some ‘experts’ deny totally the idea that SAS (and other regiments) personnel saw service in Vietnam.
I was told, some years ago, by a soldier who had worked with the SAS, that the most respected SAS men were those who had fought in Vietnam, the most popular stories in the bar at Hereford being those from that particular war. A similar account came from a member of the Parachute Regiment who told of drunken nights in West Germany where the songs were from Vietnam.
Rumours that members of the SAS had secretly joined US Special Forces in Vietnam were confirmed when it was discovered that the June 1969 issue of the SAS Regiment’s normally discrete magazine ‘Mars and Minerva’, printed a photograph of SAS Sergeant Dick Meadows receiving the US Silver Star for his service in Vietnam. (The Unsinkable Aircraft Carrier, Duncan Campbell, Michael Joseph 1984.)
The close relationship between the SAS and the US Special Forces began in 1961 when an exchange training scheme was set up. It would appear that some men were seconded to Fort Bragg, the home of the Special Forces, where they were then inducted into the US Army. (See ‘Delta Force’, On Exchange Between The Two Countries, Col. Beckworth, Arms and Armour 1984)
US forces were trained by SAS personnel in Borneo (Labuan) where they received in depth instruction on jungle warfare. One SAS soldier has said that they weren’t successful with the Americans. They were too noisy and haphazard in covering their tracks, leaving chewing gum wrappers on the trail. He was seriously injured himself training US troops in the ‘Halo’ parachute jump (high altitude, low opening).
Some SAS men were at a training school in Saigon whilst South Vietnamese troops were trained in Malaysia (Kotce Timpyt)
Individual SAS members were transferred – through the British Military Attache in Saigon, Colonel John Waddy – to Australian and New Zealand SAS units, as an auxiliary force for the US expedition there. (The Kitson Experiment, Faligot)
One such soldier would seem to be Capt. Robin Letts who was awarded the Military Cross for an operation in Borneo, for ‘what was undoubtedly a classic of its kind’. He transferred to the Australian SAS (in 1966?) soon afterwards so ‘as not to miss the Vietnam war, which he survived.’ (SAS The Jungle Frontier, Peter Dickens, Arms and Armour Press, 1983)
It would be worth looking at the involvement of regiments other than SAS because it is known for instance, that the Royal Engineers were in Thailand as a support unit.
It is probable, as well, that mercenaries were used for particular missions. British mercenary John Banks claims (in Firepower, Dempster/Tomkins, Corgi 1978) that he was flown to Saigon in February 1971 having been recruited by Watchguard. He then went to DaNang where he joined a small army of mercenaries, mostly ex-SAS men.
The mercs were organised into ten-men ‘killer’ groups and infiltrated into North Vietnam to carry out specific tasks of demolition, sabotage, kidnapping, and assassination. One of the targets was a Chinese general. This operation, it is alleged, was financed by the Australian government. Banks is not terribly reliable but there is probably a grain of truth in this. (A fuller account is in Banks’ own book The Wages of Fear, Leo Cooper, 1978).
The British also provided air facilities for the Americans in Vietnam. Changi in Singapore was the main transit base for the RAF, the route being Guam, Singapore, Hong Kong. Equipment from the UK went either direct from Guam, or was transhipped at Singapore.
There are accounts of equipment being flown from Hong Kong to the Americans during particularly heavy fighting in Vietnam. It is also known that we provided transit facilities for Australian and New Zealand units. We were involved through Anzuk and Seato. (Information from personal accounts.)
Besides the human complicity was the transfer of material goods. We provided most of the napalm and 500lb bombs. The US ran out of production capacity for this size of bomb which is the one most commonly used on fighter bombers (A4’s and F4’s, Phantoms). An excellent account of the involvement of Rolls-Royce and Elliot-Automation in the supply of military hardware to US forces in Vietnam is given by Stephen Merrett in ‘Red Camden’, April/May 1969.
During the Vietnam War the GCHQ monitoring station at Little Sai Wan in Hong Kong (UKC 201 in the international Sigint network) provided the Americans with intelligence up to 1975, long after Harold Wilson had – publicly at least – expressed his Government’s opposition to the war.
The NSA co-ordinated all signals intelligence in SE Asia, and Little Sai Wan was linked to this operation. Its intercepts of North Vietnamese military traffic were used by American military command to target bombing strikes over the north. Together with NSA stations in Thailand and the Philippines, it also monitored North Vietnamese surface-to-air missile sites, enabling warnings to be relayed to bomber crews in mid-flight, allowing them to chose the safest air corridors to their targets. Such help by the British was explained away by the reference to Australian involvement.
Diplomatic intercepts by GCHQ were also helpful to the US during the build-up to the 1972 Paris peace conference. President Nixon and Dr. Henry Kissinger, then National Security Adviser, attached great importance to the mood of the North Vietnamese and the Hong Kong station’s information, which suggested that Hanoi was far from capitulating, led to the decision by Nixon and Kissinger to ‘bomb the North Vietnamese to the conference table’. (Observer 22nd June 1980)
SD